Project 2025 Would Make the US More Vulnerable to Climate Change
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This Week: Project 2025
Americans are learning more about Project 2025, a 920-page blueprint for a sweeping overhaul of federal agencies and policies, created by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, to guide the next Republican president. The Heritage Foundation produced a similar “Mandate for Leadership” in 2015. Two years into his term, CBS News reported, “[the foundation] touted that Trump had instituted 64% of its policy recommendations.” Despite former president Donald Trump’s recent protestations that he “knows nothing about it,” many of its authors were members of his administration.
We’ve already written about how Project 2025 calls for repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, shredding regulations that accelerate the clean energy transition, and increasing fossil fuel production — all of which will reverse progress the US has made to combat climate change.
But Project 2025’s attack on climate action is more extensive than that, and comes at a time when the US needs to cut emissions in order to slow the progress of climate change and make society-wide adaptations to respond to and prepare for worsening climate consequences. Project 2025 advocates for the deprioritization — and, in some cases, the elimination — of the study of climate science and contingency planning for climate impacts across agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency; the Commerce, Defense, and Energy departments; the Council on Environmental Quality; and the National Security Council.
Reporting Ideas
- Project 2025: “The President should… issue an executive order to reshape the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and related climate change research programs.… The next President should critically analyze and, if required, refuse to accept any USGCRP assessment prepared under the Biden Administration.”
The USGCRP has written reports every four years since 1990 that highlight risks, impacts, and recommended responses to climate change by region. The Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA) was released in 2023. “The NCA provides exactly the kind of information policymakers need, without being policy-prescriptive,” Union of Concerned Scientists analysts noted after the Trump administration tried to bury the fourth NCA in 2018.
Report on current and future risks to your region. Ask candidates how they’re planning for climate adaptation.
- Project 2025: “The National Oceanographic [sic] and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories…. The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded.”
NOAA provides “essential baseline and trend information to inform decision makers about the impacts of climate change on the ocean with data on ocean temperature, sea level, currents, species distribution, and more.” Like Florida’s law banning the use of the words “climate change,” deleting climate data is not a climate solution.
Ask candidates how they are using NOAA research to inform their policies to protect communities from climate impacts.
- Project 2025: “The President should instruct the CEQ to rewrite its regulations implementing NEPA along the lines of the historic 2020 effort and restoring (sic) its key provisions such as banning the use of cumulative impact analysis.”
Cumulative impact analysis helps policymakers understand how a proposed project might contribute to climate change or adversely affect the health of a community, especially in regard to environmental justice. In addition to the federal NEPA regulations, 13 states consider cumulative impacts to target resources, enact new protections, and/or promote further study of vulnerable communities.
Does your state government review “cumulative impacts”? How are they using that analysis to protect communities?
- Project 2025: The National Security Council (NSC) “should rigorously review” staffing “to prioritize the core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense matters, including climate change, critical race theory, manufactured extremism, and other polarizing policies…”
The US Defense Department directs the National Defense Strategy and has considered climate change a priority threat multiplier in planning for US national security and international conflicts for decades. Project 2025 recommends that the National Defense Strategy be taken away from the Defense Department and put “fully under the purview of political appointees in the White House and its National Security Council.” This chapter was written by Ross Vought, a likely candidate for White House chief of staff in a second Trump administration.
Interview military personnel in your region to learn about climate impacts they are dealing with in regard to resilience and readiness.
Take Inspiration
- The Guardian laid out Project 2025’s recommendations for the next Republican president “to bolster the planet-heating oil and gas industry and hamstring the energy transition.”
- The Union of Concerned Scientists’ Rachel Cleetus detailed the provisions of Project 2025 that would be “disastrous for our nation and our climate.”
- The second pillar of Project 2025 will provide a conservative personnel database of up to 20,000 vetted individuals to fill government jobs. The Los Angeles Times dug into one Heritage Foundation–funded group compiling a list of current federal employees “who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda — and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.”
Spotlight Piece
The New York Times’s Lisa Friedman focused on the climate implications of a Project 2025 mandate, highlighting the progress the US has made on climate mitigation and adaptation policies that Project 2025 would seek to reverse.
Announcing Locally Sourced!
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